Today marks 140 years when two Catholic French nationals Fr Siméon Lourdel and Brother Amans Antoine Delma landed at Kyettale now Kigungu on the shores of Lake Victoria.
The arrival of the two Roman Catholic missionaries on Monday, February 17, 1879, saw the first Mass being said on what later became the Ugandan territory and the culmination of a journey which started on the holy Wednesday of April 17, 1878 in Algiers.
The journey started from the White Fathers’ Institute, which was founded by Archbishop Charles-Martial-Allemand Lavigerie, also a Frenchman.
With that mass, Fr Lourdel and Brother Amans oversaw the birth of Catholicism in Buganda and later Catholicism spread to the rest of Uganda.

From Kyettale the duo went to Bugonga where they stayed for a few days as word of their arrival was brought to Kabaka Muteesa’s palace.
They were later hosted in Kitebi, a Kampala suburb, by the family of Amir Sekikkubo on the February 21 as they waited for a meeting with Kabaka Mutesa at his palace, in Lubaga on February 23.
Unfortunately, Brother Amans was under the weather and did not make it to the meeting. However, he later joined Fr Lourdel and they stayed at the palace for a while as guests of the king.
In less than a month, as guests of the court, the king gave them land in Lubya-Nabulagala were a house was constructed for them. And on March 7, 1879, they moved into their new home. This became their base as they started their Catholic mission work.

Though the first group to arrive at Kyettale (Kigungu) was of two missionaries, while setting off from Algiers the team was made up of five missionaries. The other three Livinhac, Barbot and Girault had remained in Kageye, Mwanza in northern Tanzania. However, with a permanent home secured, Amans left Lubya at the beginning of April, less than two months after their arrival, to collect the other members of the team. He returned to Kigungu on June 17 with the three missionaries.
He, however, went ahead of them to Lubya to inform Lourdel. The three joined the pioneers at Lubya- Nabulagala later. Lourdel had to inform Mutesa of their coming before they joined him.

Buganda was a transit station
The Catholic evangelisation of Buganda was a by the way. Buganda was supposed to be a transit station, the focus of Catholicism coming to Uganda was the Equatorial Province. Lavigerie’s focus was on the Equatorial Province, now DR Congo, where he wanted to counter the expansion of the Belgian King Leopold’s African empire.
According to the Missionaries of Africa series nine, Lavigerie considered Buganda one of the points of departure for the evangelisation of the interior of Equatorial Africa.
As a launch pad for his venture into Equatorial Africa, Lavigerie gave orders to his five messengers to target the king for conversion first. “The king would be one of the first converts, whose conversion would bring about that of all his people,” he said, adding, “by winning over the chief, you will do more for the progress of the mission than if you won over one-by-one, hundreds of poor blacks.”
In order to win over the heart of the king and his subjects the missionaries were directed to learn the local language as quickly as possible for effective communication.
However, because the Arabs had made inroads into Buganda earlier on, Lourdel and Amans found Swahili and Arabic already spoken by some natives.

The two had picked the language from their porters on the way to Buganda and as a result the two languages were the initial medium of communication with their converts